A set of tools for parsing, manipulating, and graphing data classified by a hierarchy (e.g. a taxonomy).

Metacoder is an R package for reading, plotting, and manipulating large taxonomic data sets, like those generated from modern high-throughput sequencing, like metabarcoding (i.e. amplification metagenomics, 16S metagenomics, etc). It provides a tree-based visualization called "heat trees" used to depict statistics for every taxon in a taxonomy using color and size. It also provides various functions to do common tasks in microbiome bioinformatics on data in the taxmap format defined by the taxa package, such as:
vegantaxa package.phyloseq format and the taxa formatThis project is available on CRAN and can be installed like so:
install.packages("metacoder")
You can also install the development version for the newest features, bugs, and bug fixes:
install.packages("devtools")devtools::install_github("grunwaldlab/metacoder")
All the documentation for metacoder can be found on our website here:
https://grunwaldlab.github.io/metacoder_documentation/
The function that simulates PCR requires primersearch from the EMBOSS tool kit to be installed. This is not an R package, so it is not automatically installed. Type ?primersearch after installing and loading metacoder for installation instructions.
Many of these operations can be done using other packages like phyloseq, which also provides tools for diversity analysis. The main strength of metacoder is that its functions use the flexible data types defined by taxa, which has powerful parsing and subsetting abilities that take into account the hierarchical relationship between taxa and user-defined data. In general, metacoder and taxa are more of an abstracted tool kit, whereas phyloseq has more specialized functions for community diversity data, but they both can do similar things. I encourage you to try both to see which fits your needs and style best. You can also combine the two in a single analysis by converting between the two data types when needed.
If you use metcoder in a publication, please cite our article in PLOS Computational Biology:
Foster ZSL, Sharpton TJ, Grünwald NJ (2017) Metacoder: An R package for visualization and manipulation of community taxonomic diversity data. PLOS Computational Biology 13(2): e1005404. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005404
Metacoder is under active development and many new features are planned. Some improvements that are being explored include:
To see the details of what is being worked on, check out the issues tab of the Metacoder Github site.
This work is subject to the MIT License.
Metacoder's major dependencies are taxa, taxize, vegan, igraph, dplyr, and ggplot2.
This package includes code from the R package ggrepel to handle label overlap avoidance with permission from the author of ggrepel Kamil Slowikowski. We included the code instead of depending on ggrepel because we are using functions internal to ggrepel that might change in the future. We thank Kamil Slowikowski for letting us use his code and would like to acknowledge his implementation of the label overlap avoidance used in metacoder.
We would like to hear about users' thoughts on the package and any errors they run into. Please report errors, questions or suggestions on the issues tab of the Metacoder Github site. We also welcome contributions via a Github pull request. You can also talk with us using our Google groups site.
calc_n_samples where the message reported the number of taxa instead of the number of rows in the table.heat_tree_matrix that happened when factors were used for treatments (issue #240.zero_low_counts now ignores NAs instead of odd error.compare_groups now ignores NAs instaed of returning NaNmore_than option to calc_n_samples so that users can set the minimum threshold for whether a sample is counted or not instead of it always 1.calc_prop_samples function for calculating the proportion of samples with a value greater than 0 (issues #233.primersearch is faster and takes less memory by using ape::DNAbin objects internally.calc_taxon_abund about 5x faster.taxmap objects can be converted to phyloseq objects using as_phyloseq.primersearch now takes and returns a taxmap object with results added as tables. primersearch_raw is a new function that behaves like the old primersearch did, returning a table.dataset option of many functions has been renamed to data to match the option name in the taxa package.heat_tree_matrix that happen when the input data is not exactly like that produced by compare_groups (issues #195, #196, #197).output_file was used with heat_tree_matrix. Now whole plot is saved instead of last subplot. (issue #203)parse_mothur_tax_summary when reading from a file path (issue #211).zero_low_counts when using use_total = TRUE (issue #227).parse_phyloseq error when arbitrary rank names were used.heat_tree_matrix always has a 1:1 aspect ratio. (issue #205)subtaxa that caused an error when all of subset is FALSE. (issue #143)filter_taxa that caused an error when all taxa are filtered out. (issue #144)heat_tree now uses the taxmap class defined in the taxa package.primersearchprimersearch output to be cleaner and have info like the amplicon sequence and primer binding sites.heat_tree_matrix to make plotting a pairwise matrix of heat trees for comparing treatments.parse_mothur_tax_summary for mothur *.tax.summary file made by classify.seqs.parse_mothur_taxonomy for mothur *.taxonomy file made by classify.seqs.parse_qiime_biom for the QIIME BIOM output.parse_phyloseq to convert phyloseq objects.parse_newick to parse newick files.parse_unite_general for unite general FASTA release. (issue #154)parse_rdp for RDP FASTA release. (issue #160)parse_silva_fasta for SILVA FASTA release. (issue #162)calc_obs_props to calculate proportions from observation counts (issue #167parse_greengenes for the Greengenes database. (issue #?)write_greengenes to create an imitation of the Greengenes database format.write_rdp to create an imitation of the RDP database format.write_mothur_taxonomy to create an imitation of the mothur taxonomy format.write_unite_general to create an imitation of the UNITE general FASTA release.write_silva_fasta to create an imitation of the SILVA FASTA release.compare_treatments to compare multiple samples in multiple treatments, applying a user-defined function.calc_taxon_abund to sum observation values for each taxon.col_names option to calc_taxon_abund to set names of output columns.evaluation nested too deeply: infinite recursion / options(expressions=)? occurs due to too many labels being printed.heat_tree: improved how the predicted bondries of text is calcuated, so text with any rotation, justification, or newlines influences margins correctly (i.e. does not get cut off).heat_tree: Can now save multiple file outputs in different formats at onceheat_tree now gives a warning if infinite values are given to itextract_taxonomy: There is now a warning message if class regex does not match (issue #123)heat_tree: Increased lengend text size and reduced number of labelsextract_taxonomy: added batch_size option to help deal with invalid IDs betterheat_tree option margin_size funcion now takes four values instead of 2.heat_tree: Fixed bug when color is set explicitly (e.g. "grey") instead of raw numbers and the legend is not removed. Now a mixure of raw numbers and color names can be used.heat_tree that made values not in the input taxmap object not associate with the right taxa. See this post.extract_taxonomy: Fixed an error that occured when not all inputs could be classified and sequences were suppliedprimersearch that cased the wrong primer sequence to be returned when primers match in the reverse directionparse_mothur_summary where "unclassified" had got changed to "untaxmap" during a search and replaceextract_taxonomymutate_taxa and mutate_obs that made replacing columns result in new columns with duplicate names.plot_taxonomy and the plot method have been renamed heat_tree.taxon_levels have been replaced with n_supertaxa to make names conceptually consistent. Note that this means what was 1 as taxon_levels is now 0 as n_supertaxa.n_subtaxa and n_subtaxa_1 functionstaxmap objects!print method for taxmap objectsextract_taxonomy works on SeqFastadna class from seqinrparse_mothur_summary function: parses the mothur summary tableremove_redundant_names function: removes components of names of taxa in subtaxa